An Empirical Text Mining Analysis of Fort McMurray Wildfire Disaster Twitter Communication using Topic Model

Kaila Rajesh Prabhakar and Satish D.

Twitter has emerged as one of the most preferred disaster communication medium particularly in those countries where it has significant presence. Fort McMurray, Canada was engulfed in a wildfire in May 2016 that burnt down major part of the city and the disaster communication on twitter related to this was studied. Tweets related were downloaded and analyzed using frequency analysis, correlation analysis and Topic Model Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Gibbs Method). The LDA model automatically discovered the most relevant topics that are highly correlated probabilistically to the effective and reliable disaster communication. The disaster communication pattern also followed the various disaster stages as initially most of the information was related to intensity, evacuation and relief efforts followed by the updates and status of the wildfire and firefighting efforts and finally related to phased returning of residents back to city.

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‘Organized Rehabilitation’, Resilience and Survivability: An Empirical Analysis

Mohammed Irshad S.

Relocating the disaster-affected communities from the disaster-affected area is a global strategy. Communities, which are affected by disaster, generally, do not oppose the replacement. This also attributes to the idea of resilience building. This paper discusses the case of Tsunami victims in Kerala, India. Two villages in Kerala lost 171 lives in the Tsunami; 1,052 families had been relocated from the coastal area to a place 7 kilometres away and these 1,052 families had resettled in 38 settlements. The land for these settlements was purchased by the State Government and with the help of NGOs, INGOs, religious agencies and private contribution it also provided other amenities such as housing, sanitation and water supply. Resettlement created resilience in term of tsunami risk; however, it hardly created any long-term economic and social resilience. This raises some critical issues in the institutional understanding of resilience building. The post-disaster investments in the affected areas have not offered any substantial change in the quality of life of the affected communities. Resilience building has not been integrated into the post-disaster investments.

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